SEGREGATION STORY by Gordon Parks, with contributions from Michael E. Shapiro, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., et al. (FIRST EDITION)

Steidl, The Gordon Parks Foundation, High Museum of Art, 2014, First edition, 112 pp., 10" X 11 1/2", Hardcover

Near fine+

In the summer of 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to Alabama to document the daily realities of African Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the rural South. The resulting color photographs are among Parks’ most powerful images, and, in the decades since, have become emblematic representations of race relations in America. Pursued at grave danger to the photographer himself, the project was an important chapter in Parks’ career-long endeavor to use the camera as a weapon for social change.

After the photographs were first presented in Life, the bulk of Parks’ assignment was thought to be lost. In 2011, five years after Parks’ death, the Gordon Parks Foundation found more than 200 color transparencies belonging to the series and In 2014 the series was first published as a book.

This is a true first edition, not to be confused with the 2015 second edition or the 2022 reprint edition.